Health and Welfare benefits?

[Montana_Sam]

Hello all,

I'm a longterm employee of a small, family owned tree service outfit here in Northwest Montana. We work between a 8 and 9 month summer season, get laid off in the winter, and make around $28K during that time.

I'm curious if there is a way to increase an employees pay, on the books, while avoiding higher worker's comp payments. From what I understand my employer pays a percentage of my wage to worker's comp, so the higher you pay a guy, the more goes towards insurance....which in my opinion is backwards, because if you have highly skilled, SAFE, long-term employees, they are LESS likely to be a safety/health risk.

Once when working for a local municipality on a tree contract here, we received a "health and wellfare" bonus on our wages, which was about $5/hr...and I'm thinking it was not taxed or factored into the worker's comp insurance rates. On top of this was the "fringe benefit" which came to about $12/hr...put that ontop of Davis Bacon wages and you had some happy tree guys.

So....other small business owners out there, does my question make sense? Is there a way to get your guys some additional money while avoiding the higher costs associated with Worker's Comp?...such as a "health benefit" or something to that tune??

Thanks!

 

[ATH]

Each state and/or insurance policy is going to be different. If was that easy, you'd see a LOT of very low wages and high "health and wellness" benefit packages.

What kind of work do you do? Your employer might check to see if they can use different codes based on what you are doing for the day.
Most of the work we do is reported under:
*0106 TREE PRUNING, SPRAYING, REPAIRING-ALL OPERATIONS & DRIVERS (16.2%)
But when not doing any overhead pruning work, I can use:
*0042 LANDSCAPE GARDENING & DRIVERS (3.2%)
And when we are planting:
*9102 PARK NOC-ALL EMPLOYEES & DRIVERS (1.2%)